Crowdsourcing Our Cultural Heritage

About this blog

Posts from a cultural heritage technologist on digital humanities, heritage and history, and user experience research and design. A bit of wishful thinking about organisational change thrown in with a few questions and challenges to the cultural heritage sector on audience research, museum interpretation, interactives and collections online.

Tag: gc4

Here are my thoughts from Gamecamp 4 (#gc4), an unconference held at London South Bank University on Saturday, May 14. Overall I had a great time, and managed to put some faces to names as well as catching up with people I knew. I don’t think I learnt anything startling, but some of the sessions were great for helping me rediscover bits I already knew and clarify thoughts on other things. That might be a sign that I’ve been spending too much time thinking about games lately, or that the field is so huge and diverse that the chances of any session being on a topic that interests me and having the same approach (e.g. not video games) is smaller.

I also ran a session on ‘hacking museum games‘ with Katy Beale to try to find out whether the excellent people at the event thought it was possible to run a hack event to produce new games with museums, get a sense of who’d be interested and hopefully learn from other people’s experience with hack-type events with people new to games. I’ve written up the notes I took at the time, but would also love to hear from people who have more thoughts. It wasn’t in that session but based on other activities going on at the unconference I decided my new dream is to have a museum zombie larp.

So, onto notes from other sessions… They’re really rough, sorry! I haven’t got the names or twitter IDs of the speakers, so please let me know if you know them.

5 tips to improve your game run by Graham McAllister1 comparing controls (before building) – e.g. do a heuristic comparison of control methods like direct manipulation, d pads with requirements eg small controlled movements, big movements2 tutorials – the art of integrated game tutorial design – make a list of everything you want the player to be able to do. Think of the ideal player (probably you cos you’ll really know your game). Is there a safe space to practice the skills you want people to learn? Integrate tutorials into gameplay – how? Use characters to deliver instructions. Can show them, tell them (text or audio) or get them to practice it.3 involve users – but if you’re play testing, don’t ask them what they think. Ask people to draw their experience at the end – they remember the initial experience and the end, maybe something big in the middle. They won’t remember the details afterwards. So how? Record it then walkthrough. Biometrics or observe the video and take them back to the moment afterwards and ask them, you’ll get much better detail. [I nearly asked if anyone else did usability test-style think aloud testing but figured probably not as most people seemed to be video game developers]4 recruit users – demographics; psychographics (internal motivations etc)5 ux acceptance – define success tests. Write success tests for game ux acceptance – things the player should experience, not technical stuff; gives you something to keep working towards.

Suggestion from discussion – get a mirror and play through it, use your foot on the mouse to replicate experience of playing your game for the first time. [Great idea for empathy with newbie players]

[Update: I’ve come across some really detailed notes from this session, so go read Five tips to improve your game if you’re interested in usability testing for games. Also, I didn’t go to this session but there are some good notes on Can User Centered Design help games? (GameCamp report), and it’s encouraging to hear that it had a good turn-out. For some reason I thought there was resistance to user-centred design in games, presumably from the same school of ‘it makes boring, safe products’ (which is only true if you’re doing it wrong, as the notes point out), but maybe there’s not.]

The failure of the fail state.This was a quite interesting discussion, partly because people seem to have inherently different preferences, as well as variations dependent on your preferred game genres. Posited it’s better if you can die and then carry on… When is a fail state too much fail – balance between tension, high stakes and too harsh a penalty? Or too binary – do you need to reload the game, can you recover from errors, what consequences do you need to live with? Discussion of the difference between creating tension because the stakes are high vs when game is completely over unless you re-start it’s not good.

Themes across sessions: ‘all narrative is interactive’; we narrativise* experiences when we remember or reconstruct games *made-up word [actually, I can’t really remember what inspired this, I must have had a sugar rush.]

It’s always amazing the difference room setup makes in an unconference – a circle feels collaborative, desks facing the front can be ‘us v them’ [Owen Stephens pointed out that the circle setup is called ‘cabaret’ style – lovely!]